Steve’s Spring Semester at a Glance

Well, it’s finally here. Second semester senior year! This is definitely going to be a solid grand finale semester. I’m actually taking the most classes I’ve ever taken at once (6), they’re all engineering, and two are grad classes. Fun story: only two of those are actually required for me to graduate, I just wanted to squeeze as many cool classes as I could.

My two grad classes for my progressive degree are medical regulation (FDA, Patents, Quality, Good Manufacturing Practices, etc.), and a signal processing class for biomedical engineers. Both are giving me huge head starts into industry.

Speaking of industry, this is also my final semester as co-president of the associated students of biomedical engineering, and we have our premier event this semester: our annual corporate dinner! We already have over a dozen confirmed corporate reps coming in to meet our students and many jobs and internships are sure to be found.

Last year’s corporate dinner was one of our most successful ever! Big shoes to fill!

Structure and control in the nervous system: learn how the brain works and.how we can create devices to interface with it? Yes, please!

Special topics in BME: the ultimate elective. We’ll be working as a team of the top senior biomedical engineers to actually design solutions to problems identified by doctors at the USC med school, then vetted by the business school to identify the problems with the most potential impact and customer base. This is the closest you can get to working for a small startup in an academic setting. Our professors are super enthusiastic mentors and there are only 9 people in the class.

iPodia: This is definitely the class I’m most excited about, which is saying a lot considering the last class I described. This class is about global innovation, and its a super unique program that originated at USC where we are coenrolled with students in China, Israel, and South Korea, and the professors from each country rotate and we basically skype the classes together. The class culminates with a group project mixing students from every country, developing innovative solutions for sustainability leveraging our cross cultural backgrounds, then we travel to South Korea for two weeks to finish our projects in person!